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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22725784">Blades and Healing</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose'>lyricwritesprose</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Scatterings of History (Chronological) [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman &amp; Terry Pratchett</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Aziraphale Has PTSD (Good Omens), Aziraphale is a veteran, Flashbacks, Gen, Historical, No blood mentioned but it's pretty explicit that it would be there, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prequel to another story, There's a discorporation, There's plenty of space for it to get better but it doesn't in this story, Violence, Which is generally much happier and more lighthearted, angsty ending</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 16:28:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,086</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22725784</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In ancient Sumer, Crowley runs afoul of another demon.  Aziraphale does something that makes him risk losing himself, and he does exactly what he should do.</p><p>It's early days, though.  Don't expect him to work out which is which.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Scatterings of History (Chronological) [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634188</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>154</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Good Omens Celebration</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Blades and Healing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This work is a prequel to "A Maiden, A Dragon, and a Unicorn, Roughly Speaking."  That being said, it is a <i>completely</i> different tone from that fic, with this one being full of angst and ending on an angsty note.</p><p>I hope to make more of these historical fics and tie them together into some sort of a series.  With that in mind, I would like to ask my readers: do you think it's better to arrange the series in chronological order, or the order that I wrote them?  Or have a series for both?</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It was dusk, and many of the market stalls were closing.  The wizard produced a reed torch and propped it in a sconce.  “That one is for safe childbirth,” he said. “Premium spell, right there.  Worth ten mina. Do you have a wife, sir?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Aziraphale said, running his fingers over the amulet.  “No wife.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The amulet had traces of real demonic power in it, that was the trouble.  Usually, these wizards and amulet-sellers were frauds.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ah, well, my brother has a daughter—beautiful girl, still has all her teeth, long hair like a veil of night—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I doubt the young lady would take kindly to being promised to a foreigner,” Aziraphale said, as diplomatically as he could.  The table was covered with amulets, and most of them were entirely unmagical. Promises of money, many healthy lambs, fertile fields, cure for dysentery—all worthless.  But a handful of amulets weren’t. Aziraphale picked up another one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s well-being for a sickly infant,” the wizard said promptly.  He was a long, rangy man with snaggly teeth, perhaps forty years old—Aziraphale wasn’t good at guessing human ages.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale studied the silver pendant.  “Who is this amulet invoking?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The Demon Pazuzu,” the wizard said.  “Lord of the Drought, He Who Sends Locusts.  A powerful force. But if you don’t have a wife, that one is useless to you.  Do you have sheep? I have the blessings of Dumuzid for your herds. Scores of twin lambs, my customers tell me!  Only, with this one, you have to wrap it and put it away in the summer, when Lord Dumuzid dies, or else it becomes bad luck and your herds will wither.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The sheep amulet was as dead as any jewelry.  Aziraphale went back to the pendant that supposedly meant well-being for an infant.  “Why would you invoke the Lord of the Drought? Wouldn’t that bring misfortune on a house?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ordinarily, yes,” the wizard said.  “Mustn’t draw attention from beings like that—usually.  But, you see, the demon who brings sickness on mothers and infants is the Demon Lamashtu.”  He leaned forward confidentially. “And my divinations—ancient, awful knowledge, I paid a terrible price for it—tell me that the Demon Pazuzu opposes the Demon Lamashtu.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Really.  Why?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Eh, reading between the lines, I think it might have been a love affair gone bad.  Not that that’s any of </span>
  <em>
    <span>my</span>
  </em>
  <span> business.  The ways of gods and demons are beyond what mortals can comprehend, or ought to try comprehending, if we know what’s good for us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The amulet didn’t actually </span>
  <em>
    <span>summon</span>
  </em>
  <span> the demon, which was a mercy.  But it did contain a trace of the demon’s presence.  Which meant, Aziraphale thought, that if Lamashtu </span>
  <em>
    <span>did</span>
  </em>
  <span> do something within the amulet’s range, Pazuzu would know, and he would—what?  Manifest, and thwart her? Demons weren’t supposed to thwart each other, but then, demons were chaotic and unpredictable and evil contained the seeds of its own destruction.  It would be a thing, wouldn’t it, if Aziraphale could count on a demon thwarting another demon, leaving </span>
  <em>
    <span>him</span>
  </em>
  <span> free to try that garlic and chickpea spread that was becoming so popular in these parts—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Except that invoking demons was evil.  It would mar the souls of anyone who tried it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale shook his head.  In Heaven, they thought this sort of thing was </span>
  <em>
    <span>easy.</span>
  </em>
  <span>  Gabriel thought it was easy.  Thwart evil, promote good, how difficult could it be?  But when you were actually on Earth, it all mingled together.  Saving infants, how could that be wrong? Invoking demons, how could that be right?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“There are safer beings to invoke,” Aziraphale said.  “Listen, if you’d like to come have a cup of beer with me, I can tell you—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He broke off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A flare of demonic power.  Somewhere close.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He dropped the amulet.  “Excuse me!” It was called out over his shoulder as he ran.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Demonic power.  Someone had manifested.  And not bothered to be sneaky about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If it hadn’t been for the twisty streets, he could have run there in under a minute.  As it was, he had to navigate a red brick maze. Oil lamps and reed torches marked drinking establishments or other businesses that were open late, but there were long swaths of darkness in between.  He tripped, recovered, and dashed around a corner, breathing hard out of habit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had been wrong.  It wasn’t a demon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was </span>
  <em>
    <span>two</span>
  </em>
  <span> demons.  One of them a stranger with locusts crawling on his skin, displaying his animal aspect.  The other, familiar. Red hair. Expensive black-dyed robe. Backing away, hands raised in conciliatory fashion.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crawley.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale had a whole tangle of emotions associated with Crawley.  Aziraphale didn’t want to think about the tangle of emotions associated with Crawley.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He opened his mouth to say something.  He wasn’t sure what. </span>
  <em>
    <span>What are you doing in this city,</span>
  </em>
  <span> that was a likely one.  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Begone, foul fiend!</span>
  </em>
  <span> was Heaven-approved, but didn’t quite sit right somehow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before he could announce his presence, the locust demon lashed out.  Something in his hand. Something in his hand slashing across Crawley’s chest, leaving a path of green flame—no, a wound.  It was a wound. The something in the demon’s hand was a knife.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crawley made a horrible noise and fell backwards.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was an alley, Aziraphale decided, so there was refuse in it.  Somewhere among the refuse, there would be—yes, </span>
  <em>
    <span>there,</span>
  </em>
  <span> a sturdy stick, longer than a forearm.  He miracled it into his hand without thinking about it.  Ran forward as the demon turned, dagger still in hand, and—</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>—the smell of it, the smell of angelic blood, the smell of the horror-weapons that had torn his platoon to pieces, the pieces that were still screaming inside him and he couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, because he had taken the bloody remnants inside his own mind to bring them back to safety, but the enemy had overrun his trench and there was one in front of him and—</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Wooden stick met hellish dagger with the sound of ringing metal.  Aziraphale parried automatically, slamming the strange demon back.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>—and it took only two strokes to cut the other down, and as she hit the ground she didn’t look like an enemy anymore, she looked like any other soldier, terrified hoping this wasn’t happening praying this wasn’t happening, staring down at the long cut he had made in her being, and he wanted to kneel down and heal her but the others were on him, two on one in the narrow quarters of the trench, and he slashed—</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The sword came around and cut into the demon’s wrist.  Distantly, Aziraphale was aware that a wooden stick shouldn’t sever the hand the way it had, but it did what he needed it to do: it made the demon drop that dangerous cursed dagger.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>—screaming on the inside of him, screaming all around him, he was </span>
  </em>
  <span>stepping on bodies</span>
  <em>
    <span> in his run for safety and they screamed as he did it, because this wasn’t human war, this wasn’t human war and Death didn’t come to take the horror away, not here, not now, the pieces always tried to worm back together, and everything smelled like blood and weapons—</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The sword came back in a smooth arc.  Simple. Easy. Just like training.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The demon’s head spun end over end as it left his neck, looking very surprised, and then hit the packed dirt of the alleyway and started dissolving into smoke.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale’s arm raised the sword instinctively, in preparation for the next opponent.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Screaming.  Sobbing. The agony of his shattered platoon, tucked inside his mindscape where he could carry them to safety, and he wanted to sob as his hand butchered anything that came at him, but he didn’t, he just kept cutting, like a clockwork angel, cutting and cutting and cutting—</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Nothing happened.  No new opponent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was sobbing, but it wasn’t coming from Aziraphale.  It was coming from behind him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He turned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crawley.  Crawley, who had been cut by that dagger, whatever it was.  The long slash across his chest was burning. He was curled in on himself, shaking with pain, but still instinctively trying to choke down the sounds as if to keep enemies from hearing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale was holding a sword.  And it had become a real sword, sometime during the fight.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He didn’t have a sheath for it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Defiantly, not caring what the quartermaster would say about treating your weapons that way, Aziraphale dropped it.  And moved forward towards Crawley.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The demon didn’t look at him.  The demon, from what Aziraphale could see, was only half-conscious.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale reached out with his senses, and then flinched back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The wound across the chest wasn’t the only thing that was burning.  The demon’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>self</span>
  </em>
  <span> was burning as well.  Slowly crumpling up into ash.  The weapon, whatever it was, wasn’t meant to discorporate.  It was meant to </span>
  <em>
    <span>kill.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Slowly.  Very slowly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A demon, or an angel hit with the thing, would be able to feel themself being eaten away by the green flame.  Memories, bits of language, pieces of personality—they would feel them being destroyed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why,” Crawley whimpered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was hideous.  Obscene. Nothing like that dagger should exist.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why would you do this to us?”  Barely intelligible, a sob more than a sentence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Heaven would say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>good riddance, one less demon to worry about.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why would you </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> this to us?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The words didn’t just hit Aziraphale’s ears.  They struck somewhere in his chest. Angels can hear prayers.  Angels can always hear prayers, if they’re close enough, and somehow, </span>
  <em>
    <span>why would you do this to us</span>
  </em>
  <span> was a prayer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Heaven would say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>good riddance, one less demon to worry about.</span>
  </em>
  <span>  But this wasn’t just a demon, this was </span>
  <em>
    <span>Crawley.</span>
  </em>
  <span>  And Aziraphale’s nerves were still shaking with the memory of the War, the way his arm had cut down every opponent who charged at him, the way they looked exactly the same as the people he was trying to save, and sounded exactly the same as they cried and tried to shove their innards back in and all of a sudden he was seeing Crawley’s face on every rebel he had cut down, and—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale couldn’t leave Crawley like this.  He couldn’t leave anyone like this, but especially not Crawley.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale knelt beside the fallen demon.  “If this doesn’t work,” he whispered, “it should at least take away your agony.”  By killing the demon altogether, but he was already dying, dying by inches, what was there to lose by trying?  “But let’s see—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Healing energy.  Healing energy not just into the cut, but into the demon’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>self.</span>
  </em>
  <span>  Aziraphale had to remove the green fire—was it fire, or was it poison?—and it fought him.  Snarled, like a living thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Begone, poison, you are not welcome here.</span>
  </em>
  <span>  Pushing back, smothering it, blanketing it with </span>
  <em>
    <span>himself,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and Aziraphale could feel the flames lick into him, just a little, perhaps taking a memory of a meal, or the way the sunlight looked on one particular afternoon.  He should draw back. He should really draw back. If the flames caught—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The flames didn’t catch.  They guttered, confused. And then died.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale took a deep breath and then began closing the wound.  Slowly, carefully, ready to draw back if his touch put the demon in deeper agony.  Drawing the edges together. Yes, like that. Not that different from healing a human, all told.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Better.  Better.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All done.  And the demon was unconscious, no longer delirious, no longer praying, just loose and limp in sleep.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale sat back on his heels, and only then realized what he had done.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aid and comfort to the enemy.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You’re an angel, I don’t think you can do the wrong thing,</span>
  </em>
  <span> but that was demonstrably, </span>
  <em>
    <span>painfully</span>
  </em>
  <span> untrue, wasn’t it?  Many times. Many times, among the humans, he had done the wrong thing—helped the wrong person, tried to mend a relationship that was better off dead, put his trust in the untrustworthy.  And now he had healed a demon. Aid and comfort to the enemy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Gabriel would—Gabriel would—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale didn’t know what Gabriel would do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something terrible.  Something terrifying.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Gabriel would be </span>
  <em>
    <span>right,</span>
  </em>
  <span> because Aziraphale’s duty—his clear responsibility—was to pick up the cursed dagger on the other side of the alley and ram it through the demon’s heart, and he already knew that he wasn’t going to do that.  He couldn’t do that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wasn’t an angel.  Not really. He was something else, something broken, something foul.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He slid his arms under Crawley’s shoulders and knees.  Picked him up. The demon didn’t weigh much. All limbs.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“An inn,” Aziraphale said aloud.  “Pay an innkeeper to take you in until you wake up—”  There was an establishment just around the corner. Aziraphale had seen it as he ran.  Granted, the picture above the door said that it wasn’t an inn </span>
  <em>
    <span>exactly,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and Aziraphale should probably do something about the way those young women were earning their money, but on the other hand, money had to be earned, that was the rule of the human world, making everything gray and fuzzy and impossible to sort out, good from evil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And once Crawley was in a bed, once he was asleep and recovering, Aziraphale could take the cursed dagger and break it and bury it deep underground and run.  Run somewhere far away, China, the Americas, where he didn’t have to think about lovely yellow eyes and prayers of </span>
  <em>
    <span>why would you do this to us</span>
  </em>
  <span> and whether those prayers had anything to do with him, back in the war, cutting and slicing and never stopping.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He would be a better angel.  He would stop eating, that was it.  Stop eating. Stop taking pleasure in the sunlight, or the smell of flowers.  Stop listening to music. Stop people like that wizard regardless of whether their amulets saved children.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Just as soon as he finished saving Crawley.</span>
</p><p>§</p><p>
  <span>Crawley woke up in an alley.  Which was about where her memories stopped, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.  The surprise was the waking up part.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had screwed herself royally with this one, hadn’t she.  It had seemed like a harmless enough idea. Lamashtu was vicious, and more to the point she targeted </span>
  <em>
    <span>kids,</span>
  </em>
  <span> so why not let a few humans know that her ex-boyfriend would happily interfere with whatever she had on the boil just to frustrate her?  It wouldn’t do any harm, and if it came to light, Pazuzu’s head would be on the chopping block, not Crawley’s.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But, of course, Pazuzu had to get a taste for Earth, didn’t he?  And if you wanted to stay on Earth, the thing to do was to remove the permanent Earth-based tempter and create a nice little job opening for yourself, and Pazuzu had got a demon-killing knife—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then what?  It was a blur. Crawley could remember Pazuzu cutting her, but after that, everything was swimmy.  Hands, there had been hands on her, and Crawley thought she might have been crying about the Fall, but who, and why, and—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lamashtu.  The obvious suspect was Lamashtu.  Thwarting Pazuzu not because she was supposed to, but from spite.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Could keep a person alive, spite.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crawley got to her feet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She felt—good.  Well, not </span>
  <em>
    <span>good,</span>
  </em>
  <span> obviously, that would be bad, but healthy, strong, suffused with well-being.  Better than she had before. Lamashtu was evidently one heaven of a healer. Well, she should be, she brought sickness enough, and healing was just the other side of that coin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The knife worried Crawley.  Lamashtu, presumably, had the knife.  Whether she had murdered Pazuzu with it remained to be seen, but either way, she was on the list of “could outright murder Crawley if she pissed them off.”  Along with Hastur, and Ligur, and Dagon, and the Demogorgon, and . . .</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, there was no point in fretting over it.  Crawley just had to watch her back, that was all.  She was clever enough. Clever enough, fast enough, devious enough.  She could do this.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Crawley adjusted her robe, undulated out of the alley, and tried not to remember the echo of utter fear, the horror of dissolution, and the strangely gentle feeling of hands on her skin.</span>
</p><p>§</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, Pazuzu.  What happened to, ‘I’m going topside, won’t be seeing any of you maggots?’”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Here’s a thought, Malphas,” Pazuzu said.  “How about you shut your mouth, or I cut it open until it reaches all the way around your head?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Malphas muttered something about someone pissing in Pazuzu’s porridge, but he slouched off.  Pazuzu strode off himself, unfortunately at the very moment that one of the perennial ceiling leaks dumped a blanket of slime on anything underneath it.  He blessed at length and clawed filth out of his hair. It did horrible things to locust wings, that stuff.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The thing was—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The thing was, he had cut that idiot Crawley, which meant that Crawley should dissolve screaming in, oh, it wouldn’t take him more than a day or two—which meant that a post Earthside </span>
  <em>
    <span>should</span>
  </em>
  <span> be opening up.  Any time now. But Pazuzu wasn’t sure he wanted it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had thought of it as just a smorgasbord of humans.  Tempt, torture, maybe kill a few when the boss wasn’t looking—an endless holiday.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hadn’t thought about angels.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>One particular angel, who undoubtedly had the dagger now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t even the casual ease with which the angel had dismembered him.  It was the look on his face. The look in his eyes. Blank. As if he wasn’t seeing Pazuzu at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It made you wonder—maybe the angels were something </span>
  <em>
    <span>different,</span>
  </em>
  <span> now.  Did they still think?  Did they have wills of their own?  Or were they a sort of extension of the will of Heaven?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If Pazuzu was going to be killed, he wanted it to be by someone who would look him in the eye and snarl at him.  Not by someone with that dead, unseeing expression. It gave him chills, and he wasn’t even entirely sure why.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>No.  Someone else could have Earth.  Maybe Pazuzu would put in for a transfer to the Souls department.</span>
</p><p>§</p><p>
  <span>Aziraphale’s foodless streak ended two years later, in the Amazon rainforest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After all, he told himself at the time, it was important, accepting hospitality from humans.  It was a chance for them to exercise kindness and other virtues. He would be a poor angel if he denied them the opportunity.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He tried to ignore the small voice that told him he was a poor angel anyway.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The ancient Sumerians did believe in demons called Lamashtu and Pazuzu.  Pazuzu, believed to bring droughts, was said to oppose Lamashtu, who was the demon of infant mortality and women dying in childbirth.  The idea that they were ex-lovers is mine, though.  Both of them were fairly chimerical and involved parts from several different creatures, but I decided to pick the locust because Pazuzu was supposed to bring plagues of them.</p><p>Pazuzu is also the demon in <i>The Exorcist,</i> which is sort of in the same Christian horror genre as <i>The Omen,</i> which is what <i>Good Omens</i> is skewering when it isn't off doing its own thing.  (Most of the time, it's doing its own thing.)  I figured that the gravitas of having a classic horror movie under his belt would save Pazuzu from the problem of having what is, to English speaking ears, a rather silly name.</p><p>As to why Crawley wakes up in the alley, rather than in the nearby brothel—Aziraphale was, perhaps, not particularly wise to trust that the brothel's owner would faithfully take care of an unconscious person when she had already been paid upfront.  (Several of the actual sex workers would have objected to throwing Crawley out, but—it can be very difficult to say no to the boss.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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